Who

Hyperball-ad

In the 1980’s pinball manufacturers searched desperately for ways to stay
relevant to a public that increasingly chose videogames over their mechanical
cousins. After bankruptcies and consolidation, the industry settled on
licensing movie and TV show trademarks as their path forward. But in the early
‘80s, they were still trying to be creative.

_I’m back at my cliff

still throwing things off_

In 1982, Williams introduced perhaps one of the most ill-advised pinball
machines ever made: Hyperball. The game was basically Tempest without a
monitor. Instead of moving a little vector shape around a playfield, you
rotated a cannon left and right at the bottom of a pinball chassis. Instead of
firing bolts of energy, you shot ball bearings at a rate of up to 250 balls
per minute. (Pinball geeks get all snitty when you describe Hyperball as a
pinball machine. They’re wrong. It may use nonstandard rules, different sized
balls, and have no bumpers, but it’s a pinball machine by the “how would your
mother describe this device?” rule.)

_I listen to the sounds they make

on their way down_

The game was incredibly loud, even by arcade standards. Each ball was launched
with a loud THUNK-fwip, targets clattered as you hit their flaps, balls
smacked onto wooden pieces of the playfield. And of course, ball bearings that
missed targets collided with newly fired shots, and ricocheted loudly off of
the glass plate covering the playfield. Multiply that by the rapid rate of
fire, and the noise was truly deafening. Perhaps overcompensating for this
mechanical cacophony, the electronic sound effects of the game were equally
loud, a pastiche of samples borrowed from Defender and Robotron (such as
this one).

_I follow with my eyes ‘til they crash

I imagine what my body would sound like

slamming against those rocks_

The mechanics of the game were simple and twitchy. The playfield had a number
of “target” flaps with letters in front of them. Red lightning-bolt shaped
lights stretched from the targets down to your cannon. As the game went on,
the lights illuminated, one by one, marching downward in columns. If you shot
a ball into the flap or hole associated with a column, the bottom most light
went out; the effect was as if you were “beating back” the lights. If a
lightning bolt reached the bottom of the playfield, you lost a life.

I’m simplifying the game a bit – you also had smart bombs, for example, which
destroyed everything on the playfield – but that’s the basic idea.

_and when it lands

will my eyes

be closed or open?_

The gun was not fully automatic, and had two triggers, once for each hand. You
had to pull a trigger for each ball fired. The gun could be fired at a faster
rate than you could pull the triggers, so this led to all sorts of odd
“chording” finger patterns on the triggers which could induce terminal carpal
tunnel syndrome in about 10 minutes.

Hyperball was designed by Steve Ritchie, who designed a number of games,
including the classic (or infamous, depending on your taste) Black Knight.
Hyperball occupied a strange niche, and it showed. It wasn’t videogame
enough to draw in videogame players with regularity, and it wasn’t pinball
enough to draw in pinball players either. I tried it a couple of times to
slake my curiosity, and then left it alone, saving my quarters for other, more
traditional machines. Because of the tremendous beating each game exerts on
the chassis and mechanical components, there aren’t too many of them left in
good working condition.